Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) Read online

  "Is your husband a child molester?" Anna asked when it was clear that, once the tea and amenities were seen to, Racine wasn't going to speak further without prodding.

  "Shh!" Racine hissed, her eyes on Laura.

  Anna had spoken softly so her words wouldn't carry to the child, but the admonition didn't offend her. To even speak of these things seemed to taint the air in a room.

  "No," Racine answered in a low voice. She lifted her tea as if to drink, then set it down again without taking any. "At least I don't think so."

  In that sentence lay the end of the marriage. How could a woman live with a man she didn't "think" was abusing children? That she could even have the thought was trust's death knell and the beginning of fear.

  "Dougie?" Anna asked. She suppressed an urge to glance at the doll's tea party. To look at Laura with Dougie in mind would be somehow damaging. Whether to her or the angels, Anna wasn't sure.

  "I don't know. I only know him from meeting him three or four times. He gave me the creeps--the way he looked at Laura--and I asked Blackie never to bring him to the house again. Blackie doesn't like him either. Maybe even hates him, but they had to work together."

  "At what?" Anna asked when Racine didn't go on of her own volition.

  Racine lowered her face till her hair fell in a curtain, hiding her features. "Blackie worked for an import-export company. He drove a truck, picking up things off-loaded at different ports and delivering them to a buyer here in New Orleans. Dougie sometimes went with him when there was more work than one man could do by himself."

  Again she raised the teacup, and this time it actually arrived at her lips; still, she didn't drink. Setting the untouched beverage down, she said, "I thought my husband was hauling art--the mass-produced stuff from China--that you see in shops in the Quarter. Even uptown there are a lot of antique shops that sell reproductions. Sometimes they tell the customers that they are. Sometimes they don't."

  Getting the feeling that Racine wasn't telling the whole story, Anna leveled an open, expectant gaze on her and waited.

  Finally the woman said, "I guess I guessed that some of it wasn't quite, well, kosher. Dougie was so creepy, and they called their boss the Magician instead of by his name--there were a lot of things like that. But I thought it was just maybe that some of the things Blackie was hauling were maybe stolen or contraband or the import duties hadn't been paid. And I love--loved--my husband, and Laura thinks her daddy walks on water, so . . ."

  She let the thought trail out. It didn't need finishing. She'd done what most people do, hoped and ignored and made excuses and tried to keep her and her child in the life where they were comfortable, in their home, with their family. In a way, Clare had done the same thing.

  "Then you found out something," Anna said to help bridge the gap between denial and realization.

  "Yes," Racine said. "Blackie came home from one of his trips to pick up imports and he was really upset. He grabbed a bottle of bourbon that we've had around the house so long I don't know when we even bought it--neither of us drink all that much, and mostly wine--and he poured himself a half a glassful and took it like he was taking castor oil. He got in late--sometime after midnight--and he was tired. Laura was asleep, but I'd heard his van and gotten up. When I came into the kitchen he wouldn't even look at me. He filled the glass again and knocked it back. I think it was the bourbon that let him talk. If he'd been rested and sober and in his right mind I don't think he ever would have told me. But he wasn't, and he started to cry after the alcohol hit him.

  "He said Dougie had killed a woman and her husband. From the way he said it, I think he didn't do it, but maybe he didn't stop it either. He said they'd had to make it look like an accident--or like the deaths weren't related to anything that could lead back to their boss--so they took the man's body to his house, put it in his pajamas, and burned the place down so it would look like he'd died in the fire."

  That was in keeping with what Clare had told Anna. David had been murdered. It was his corpse the firemen had carried out of the house on Laggert Street in Seattle. "What did they do with the woman's body?" Anna asked.

  "He didn't tell me, only that we were safe. By 'we' he meant me and Laura and him. Of course we never would be safe. Dougie is a rat right down to his little rat heart. If he saw a nickel in it, he'd rat out his own mother."

  Finally teacup made a successful trip to tongue and Racine took a long drink. Anna hadn't touched her tea either. Though she'd seen Racine make it, she knew the woman was steeped in voodoo with its powders and potions and skewered pigeons, and she had no intention of swallowing anything she gave her.

  They sat without talking for a moment. Laura had finished serving her dolls their tea and was now reading to them from a book about balloons and balls. Anna let her mind drift over what Racine had said; it appeared to her Racine would not have broken up her marriage over something as mundane as aiding and abetting in two murders, covering up felonies, and the illegal transport of bodies.

  "Did Blackie tell you about killing two children?" Anna asked softly, her eyes unable to tear away from Laura.

  "Blackie would never do that," Racine said and sounded sure.

  "But?"

  "But the items he hauled for the Magician weren't fake antiques or mass-produced bronzes."

  "They were people," Anna said.

  "Yes."

  "Children."

  "Not usually."

  "But sometimes."

  Racine nodded. After a moment she couldn't sit with that damnation on her husband's head any longer, and she said, "Blackie told me he thought they were orphans. Most of them were from the Middle East, but there were some from Central America, Mexico, and Asia. He said he thought they were going to be adopted--you know, those illegal adoptions for people who can't get a baby through legal channels or don't want to wait? There's big money in that."

  Another silence came and went. Anna thought, Given to nice people in the country that have a farm where Fluffy can run free. She said, "But you didn't believe him."

  "I wanted to. But I didn't think he believed himself. The bourbon had made it so he couldn't lie as well as he can sober, and I knew he really didn't think the kids were adopted. I still thought it was bad but not so bad, like they were going to be servants in people's houses or maybe do factory work."

  She looked up at Anna and shook the hair out of her face. "I know you think that makes me a monster, too--to be okay with that--but there are worse things that can happen to orphans." Such was the look of defiance and sorrow on her face, Anna guessed she'd been one of those orphans and would have traded whatever her lot was for a little overwork and underpay. Even a lot of work and no pay.

  "Yet you took Laura and moved out? When was that?" From the Amazing Patty, Anna knew Authentic Voodoo had been open for six months or more. Hardly on a timeline with events of scarcely a couple weeks back.

  "Two weeks ago," Racine said. "I'd had the shop for a while. Blackie didn't like it. Magic scares him. Even white magic. He grew up in the swamps, and he says that magic is magic and you can think it's white or black, but it is what it is in the end, and it doesn't care what you wanted it to be when you took it up. Blackie doesn't think it's like water or electricity--forces you can understand and control and use to create light or destroy cities. To him magic is alive, and, like a wild animal, it might let you think you've tamed it, but you haven't, and it will turn on you. But he was gone so much he let me have the shop."

  "Let?" Anna said. Racine didn't seem quite the type to ask a man's permission for much of anything.

  "There might have been a suggestion of Gutreaux dolls and hat pins," Racine said with the first smile she'd shown since Anna had come into the shop. "The upstairs wasn't rented, so I took it, and Laura and I moved in."

  Since Racine wasn't bothered by the possibility of her husband dealing in contraband and, though she didn't like it, wasn't suffering the tortures of the damned because he might be selling children into, if n
ot slavery, then certainly indentured servitude, Anna waited for the last revelation, the moment when Racine knew or suspected he was selling little girls to whoremongers.

  "And the straw that broke the proverbial's back?" Anna nudged when, instead of continuing her story, Racine got up and began fiddling with the teakettle.

  Racine looked over her shoulder, her eyes meeting Anna's with such loathing that Anna got ready to run. "Dougie." Racine spat out the name, her lips twisted around the vile taste it left in her mouth. "Dougie's not smart, but he thinks he is. He texted Blackie about getting some broken 'jewels.' I heard Blackie's phone go off, and I read the text. The so-called code the fool had dreamed up didn't do much to hide the fact he was asking if he could use the little girls--or boys--that were sick, dead, or damaged in some way. He was asking my husband for permission to do it. Then I knew what happened to the children Blackie delivered to the Magician.

  "He said he wasn't going to work for the man anymore--I just can't say 'the Magician,' it's too stupid!" Racine blurted out. Anna agreed but hadn't thought a woman who was a self-proclaimed voodooienne would have such a low tolerance for street theater. "He said he was going to go back and work in his dad's swamp tour business, but I left anyway."

  "What happened to the kids?"

  "My husband sold them into prostitution," Racine said with measured formality as if testing each word to see if it would hold, trying on each sound, knowing they were words she would be saying for the rest of her life either out loud or to herself.

  "He told you this?"

  "He said a couple of them had died--were dead when he and Dougie went to get them--and that he was glad they were dead because, if it was Laura, he'd rather see her half rotted and stinking than to see her after the Ma--the man's clients had done with her. I didn't listen to any more after that. I took Laura from her bed, and we came here. For a few days we slept in the shop. Then I rented these rooms."

  THIRTY-TWO

  Racine didn't know where Blackie took his imported "jewels"; nor did she know where the man who called himself the Magician conducted his business or what his real name was. She didn't know where Dougie lived, or his last name, and Blackie Gutreaux was not answering at either number Racine had given.

  Anna took a cab to the Gutreaux house in Jefferson Parish, a small bungalow half a block from the levee. She told the cabbie to wait, then knocked and rang and peeked in windows, but the place was deserted. Having no way of knowing when, or if, Blackie was going to return to the homestead, and doubting she'd have an easy time catching a cab from his neighborhood, she rode back into town with her cabbie.

  Racine said Blackie had quit working for the Magician after the murders. She had also said two children died. Anna spent a good bit of the time wasted on the cab ride debating whether this was news she should share with Clare. Had she been certain the dead children were Vee and Dana, she would have done it immediately, but the story Blackie told Racine contained the words "rotted" and "stinking."

  If Blackie was an imaginative sort, he could have been speaking metaphorically. If not, he was describing decay, corpses more than a day or two dead, depending on the temperature where the bodies were kept.

  Clare insisted she'd seen her daughters at 3:00 A.M. the morning the house burned down. Even if they had died moments after she left them to buy cough syrup, they would not have begun to smell for a while. It was possible Blackie hung around Seattle for a while after the killings and the bombing, but Anna doubted it. A man trucking cattle, whether two-legged or four-legged, has to keep to a tight schedule or he'll lose too many head before he gets to market.

  Dana and Vee could have died, then Blackie took their corpses with him and Dougie in the van, and the bodies began to get ripe somewhere between Washington and Louisiana. Carrying bodies around was dangerous business. The most likely scenario was that he and Dougie had dumped them where they wouldn't be found, or at least not for a long time. If that was the case, they'd yet to turn up. The bodies of children always made national news.

  If Dana and Vee still lived, as Clare and Mackie and Sleepy Dog attested, then whose were the little burned bodies carried from the fire? Had they been long dead when Blackie and Dougie stuffed them in the nursery? Had the Cajun and his sidekick killed them along with David Sullivan because it was easier than dealing with them? Were Dana and Vee collateral damage? Or had something gone terribly wrong with the delivery and the children meant for the whorehouse had arrived dead, dead long enough to begin to decompose, and upon discovering two little girls in a house they intended to torch, Dougie and Blackie had simply exchanged the dead for the living so they'd still get paid?

  That was a miserable thought among a host of miserable thoughts. For a fierce vicious moment, Anna wished there were something to voodoo and that Racine would bring down a curse on her husband and Dougie that would peel the skin from their flesh and the flesh from their bones.

  Arming herself with an aromatic muffuletta and a six-pack of Abita beer, Anna returned to Ursulines and knocked on Geneva's French doors. The sun had long since set, and, limned by the silver of ambient city light, Geneva manifested out of the inner darkness, the cat, so black mere ambient light would not serve to illuminate it, draped over her shoulder like a sack, and opened the glass door.

  "I come bearing gifts," Anna said.

  "Yes, I smell you. Well, one hopes it is not you but a sandwich," Geneva said and stepped back to let Anna and her gifts in. Clare's dog trotted in at her heels. Mackie had been in the yard sleeping somewhere out of sight but had materialized at the smell of food. The cat showed no interest in Anna, the dog, or the sandwich and Anna thought of Hobbes from "Calvin and Hobbes" and how he reverted to a stuffed tiger when alien eyes were upon him.

  "I was hoping for a favor," Anna said as she set the sandwich halves, each enough to feed four hungry people, on paper towels on Geneva's coffee table and uncapped a beer for each of them.

  "Why am I not reeling with shock at that announcement?" Geneva drawled.

  For a second Anna was nonplussed. A fleeting thought of manners and small talk withered on the vine, and she said, "Yes, well, that's as may be, but I was hoping you could help me search for something."

  "I'm all ears," Geneva said, emphasizing the word "ears," as she spread herself on the sofa and the black cat across her knees. "Ears and hands," she amended. "I am much more likely to grant favors if you put a beer in the latter."

  Anna did as she was asked, then joined the woman and the cat on the sofa. The whole point of a muffuletta is the olives, but Anna plucked hers out and left them on the paper towel just the same. "In the conducting of the situation of which you know nothing, about a person you've never met, I've come upon three clues as to the location of a place which, should you ever be called upon to testify, you've never heard of," Anna said.

  Geneva nodded, took a swig of her beer, and said, "I'm not listening."

  God, but Anna loved musicians. "Okay. One: a place that gives piano or singing lessons. Two: a place from which the sound pssssssst-chunk emanates. Three: a place in which you can smell lots of flowers at once."

  "The flower stall by the subway grate down from Juilliard," Geneva said without hesitation.

  "Yeah. Like that. But here." Anna took a bite of her sandwich. She'd forgotten Geneva had studied music at Juilliard. She wondered if she'd ever seen the woman in white by Saks. Well, no, she wouldn't have. She might have heard her, though, and, ten to one, if she did, the woman in white saw her. Geneva might even have been the inspiration for the singer's blind/blues shtick. Reminding herself to think about that later, Anna concentrated on the issue at hand. There was little else she could tell Geneva without compromising her even further, so she said nothing, concentrated on her sandwich, and let Geneva mull over Candy's three fractured memories.

  "You can't spit in the Quarter without getting a musician wet," Geneva said around bread and olives. "A lot of them do lessons on the side to make ends meet. I know of four piano t
eachers for sure and three vocal coaches--the one I go to and a couple of others."

  Anna's musical skills were dedicated to being an appreciative audience member. She didn't even sing in the shower for fear the soap would make fun of her. "Do piano teachers sing scales, or have the students do it?"

  "They do, but not so you'd hear it through walls--I'm assuming you are talking through walls or you'd know where you were at. But I have no interest in it, so never mind," Geneva said and took a pull of the Abita.

  "Will you show me where they are? Go with me so we can sniff and listen and, well . . . sleuth?"

  Geneva laughed. "You are weird, Anna. With talent you would have made a fine musician."

  "Oh, and my information is at least six months old," Anna remembered.

  Geneva groaned.

  After they'd eaten, the two of them finishing less than a quarter of the gigantic sandwich, Anna let herself into Clare's apartment, fed Mackie, tended to his important dog business, then shut him up for the night. The little guy wanted to go for a walk in the worst way and wagged his entire body and looked at her with beseeching brown button eyes, but Anna stayed strong. There would be enough distractions without Mackie along to pester Sammy and get underfoot.

  She ruled out North Peters, Chartres, Royal, and Bourbon streets. The heart of the tourist district was noisy and crowded. The "fancy house" was the sort of establishment that would require privacy, and the four streets cutting through the heart of the French Quarter were alive with noise year around. Candy would have heard more than scales and pssssst-chunking.